An ICSE 2012 research paper on StackMine, authored by researchers from Microsoft Research Asia's Software Analytics group and Tao Xie, was rated among the most practically relevant software engineering research (ranked the second place) of the last five years in a recent industrial relevance study.The study, published in ESEC/FSE 2015 (a flagship conference in software engineering), was conducted by researchers from Microsoft Research Redmond and Singapore Management University. These researchers asked 512 software developers to rate the relevance of 571 research papers (based on reading paper summaries that reflect research ideas in these papers) in order to determine how relevant software engineering research is to practitioners in the field. The second greatest number of respondents rated theICSE 2012 research paper on StackMine, as "essential" to software development practice.The high-practice-impact StackMine system was developed by Microsoft Research Asia's Software Analytics group to enable performance debugging in the large in practice. It mines callstack traces to help performance analysts effectively discover highly impactful performance bugs (e.g., bugs impacting many users with long response delay). As a successful technology-transfer effort in December 2010, StackMine has effectively helped a Microsoft team with their performance analysis tasks, especially for a large number of execution traces.

Although we don't necessarily endorse the study methodology or results in this ESEC/FSE 2015 study, we are always delighted to see that theICSE 2012 research paper on StackMine with high industry impact was rated as the second in thisESEC/FSE 2015 studyon industrial relevance of software engineering research. It would be interesting to investigate which other papers among the highly rated ones in the study include research that already achieves high industry impact, as the ICSE 2012 research paper on StackMinedid. We have been busy with pursuing more high-industry-impact research, without having time to do such investigation but would be happy to hear your investigation results if you have them :). See here for a related news item from UW CSE.

Congratulations to Illinois ASE PhD student Wing Lam for being selected as a 2015-2016 Illinois Technology FoundationFifty for the FutureAwardee. Such awards honor Illinois students who have proven determination and foresight through their education and deeds in the application and development of technology. The awards are open to all students from high school juniors to graduate students that do not graduate before March 15, 2016.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Recently Professor Tao Xie, the lead of the Illinois ASE Group, has been selected to serve on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE). TSE is a flagship journal (published bimonthly) in software engineering research. TSE celebrates its 40th Anniversary.TSE is interested in well-defined theoretical results and empirical studies that have potential impact on the construction, analysis, or management of software. The scope of this Transactions ranges from the mechanisms through the development of principles to the application of those principles to specific environments.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

A team consisting of Illinois ASE PhD students Wing Lam and Wei Yang have been selected as a finalist team for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (Qlnf) 2016. They have been selected from 129eligible applications and are among the 34 finalist teams. The contest now moves on to the QInF 2016 Finals at Qualcomm Research Center in San Diego, CA in late March, 2016.Besides the team consisting of Wing and Wei, there are four other finalist teams from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In total, there are three teams from Illinois CS and two teams from Illinois ECE among the 34 finalist teams.